All posts tagged ‘Greek myths’

My kids have been hooked on Greek mythology since they were tiny, beginning with D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths and working their way up to Percy Jackson and beyond. When author/illustrator George O’Connor began publishing gorgeous graphic novels about Zeus and his ilk, all of us were thrilled. Now in its fifth installment, O’Connor’s Olympians series continues to captivate with a look at the many moods of the god of the sea: Poseidon: Earth Shaker, published by First Second Books.

Melissa Wiley: George, thanks so much for agreeing to chat with us about your work! You have a lot of fans in the GeekMom crowd. And in my house. We’re all impressed by how you manage to bring something new to the storylines we know so well — that’s no mean feat.

Tell us about the genesis of the Olympians series. You mention that you fell in love with the Greek myths when you were a kid — how were you introduced to them? What are your favorite versions (both now and as a kid)? When did you decide to write graphic novels about them?

George O’Connor: I was always the kid who liked to draw pictures and tell stories, and I especially liked to draw pictures and tell stories with monsters in them. When I was in the fourth and fifth grade, I was part of an experimental educational program where, for a couple days a week, myself and a group of other kids left our regular classes and spent the day in a very interesting immersive study program — we did a lot of creative writing and journaling, we made our own Rube Goldberg inventions, all kinds of cool things. A lot of what I was exposed to then is still the stuff I am most interested in now.

We spent a month studying the Algonquin and Iroquois people, and that in part inspired my first graphic novel Journey into Mohawk Country. And the biggest thing for me, we spent the last couple of months of my 4th grade year studying Greek mythology, and that changed everything. I became a Greek Myth addict, and I read everything I could find about the myths, and drew the gods, heroes and monsters constantly.

Like every budding mythophile, my favorite mythology book growing up was D’aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths — I never actually owned that one, but I took it out from the library every few months, and would re-devour it. D’aulaires’ still holds up well for me — the illustrations are so weird, but it does a great job of knitting together the unwieldy tapestry of Greek myths into a coherent narrative.

Strangely, despite this lifelong love affair with Greek mythology, it wasn’t my idea to create the Olympians graphic novel series. I had actually been working on another related idea, about the gods in the modern day, that would have been a more adult, satirical examination about society in general, but it wasn’t quite pulled together fully yet. One day I was hanging out with my Roaring Brook picture book editor Neal Porter at his apartment, and he compared a mutual acquaintance of ours to Cerberus, the drooling three-headed hellhound of Hades. I responded with some equally geeky Greek reference to a Cyclops or something, and Neal fixed me with a look, pulled a book off the shelf and said “What if you did a graphic novel, about this size, retelling the Greek myths?”

It was a real Eureka moment for me, and I raced home. I came back 2 weeks later with the first draft of Zeus: King of the Gods and plans for eleven more books.

MW: I love your recounting of the tale of Odysseus and Polyphemos. Seeing it play out visually made for a really powerful, hair-raising encounter, and I marveled at how vivid and tight your depiction was. It felt like a completely fresh story — and Odysseus’s hubris has never hit me quite so hard before. When he reveals his identity to Polyphemos, thus invoking Poseidon’s wrath and revenge against him, I was like the person in the movie theater screaming at the character not to open the door. Was it hard to limit yourself to just that segment of Odysseus’s story?

GO’C: I’m loving the mental image of people in a theater yelling advice to Odysseus — Don’t go in that cave, you fool! You’re gonna get eaten! Odysseus is such an amazing character — too clever by half, resourceful and heroic, but so deeply flawed — and this is made more amazing by that, chronologically speaking, he comes along so early in the development of our civilization. The Odyssey is one of the earliest written works we have, and it’s already an incredibly sophisticated piece of storytelling. The Greeks set the bar so high, they skipped all the baby steps. It’s like an architect who just started out and made the Great Pyramids or something.

I reread The Odyssey every few years (most often the Lattimore translation, if anyone’s interested) and the task of interpreting that, even just a tiny part, was very daunting. I chose to only relate the Polyphemos section because, well, it’s so harrowing and gruesome, and also it’s very key to the story — it explains the whole reason of Poseidon’s enmity toward Odysseus. I want to mention also that I stuck very, very close to the way that the story is told in The Odyssey itself — all that intense scary stuff is right in there, you just have to read it carefully. That’s one of the things that is so great about comics — the combination of visuals and words can make the immersion in the story so easy, so complete.

MW: Major geek bonding moment here, because the Lattimore translation is my favorite, too. I’m also fond of Padraic Colum’s The Children’s Homer. Okay, with such an immense body of material to choose from, how do you decide what parts of the gods’ stories to tell in detail?

GO’C: In a perfect world, I would be able to clone myself a hundred times over and every Greek myth would get the graphic retelling treatment. Well, actually, that wouldn’t be a perfect world — might be a few people out there who would want to see a complete O’Connor take on the oeuvre of Greek myths, but I bet I could count that number on one hand, and I wouldn’t be one of them.

When I set out to make Olympians I made this huge spreadsheet of all the gods, and which stories I most wanted to tell about them, stories that were instrumental to an understanding of the god. I knew that a lot of these stories would interweave through one god’s story into another, so I was careful to make sure I would introduce a key element in one god’s book that would be key to understanding another god later. Each book will stand alone, and hopefully will paint a full portrait of the god or goddess in question, but if you read the whole series all together, a more rich, more complete picture will be revealed.

And sometimes I just want to draw something so unbelievably cool I just need to fit it in, no matter what.

MW: Poseidon’s dream — his life as a horse — was my favorite part of the book. Gorgeous and wrenching. In your author’s note you talk about how that sequence made the book come together for you, gave you the insight into Poseidon that you needed. Can you speak a bit more about how you arrived at that scene?

G O’C: Yeah, that was a risky story to include, I felt, and I was worried its strangeness might lose some readers, but most folks really seem to dig it.

In ancient Greece, there was no Bible-equivalent, no codified selection of stories that stood as the official canon. Stories varied from town to town, and in some areas of Greece there was a tradition that Poseidon, like his little brother Zeus, was also spared the indignity of being devoured by his father Kronos, and instead lived his early life out in disguise as a stallion. I liked that because it explained the apparently incongruous connection between a god of the sea and horses, but I had already established, in Zeus, that Kronos had indeed swallowed Poseidon upon his birth. But Poseidon hadn’t died — like his siblings, he had grown up in his father’s belly. What had he done that whole time? This was my chance to use this other tradition of myth, that Poseidon had a whole lifetime as a stallion, galloping over green fields with his mare and foal, and reveal that he had dreamed it while he slept in his father’s belly. Then one day, he was literally vomited out of the only life, the only form he had ever known, into the ocean and, well, it’s not hard to guess why he’s such a temperamental god.

MW: Who was your favorite god or goddess when you were a kid? Has it changed?

GO’C: Hermes was my favorite god as a kid — I even dressed up as him to deliver an oral report back when I was in fourth grade — and he still is now. I think he ends up getting most of the best lines in Olympians. My favorite goddess is Hera, who gets most of the good lines that Hermes doesn’t. She wasn’t necessarily a favorite when I was a kid, though I did feel most authors gave her an undeserved bad rep. Of course she’s mean sometimes! She has the worst husband of all time!

MW: Ooh, good point — has working on these books changed the way you look at any of the other gods or goddesses? Any you now like more or less than you did before you started?

GO’C: A really cool part of working on this series is that as I finish each book I do feel like I have a much better understanding of the goddess or god in question. In fact, it’s kind of fair to say that the subject of which ever book I most recently completed is my favorite (sorry Hermes!). I just finished book six, Aphrodite, and I came away from that with a deeper understanding of the goddess of love, and how difficult it must have been for her to marry into the ultimate dysfunctional family of the Olympians. I’m a huge Aphrodite booster now.

Sometimes the act of writing the book will completely change the way I feel about a character — in Hera: The Goddess and Her Glory I tell the story of Heracles and I was always pretty blah about him before, but after getting into his head he is now my favorite hero. Conversely, growing up my favorite hero was always Theseus, and in writing his story in Poseidon: Earth Shaker, I realized what a total jerk he was and wrote him pretty much as a straight up villain.

MW: Yes, I appreciated your take on Theseus. Your depiction of Ariadne alone on the shore, waiting, waiting, is just devastating. Okay, next question: who are some of your writing influences?

GO’C: This is a tricky question — I have a lot of writers who have influenced me, but hopefully that occurs more on the subconscious level — once I notice I’m being influenced by a particular writer, I try to dial back that influence a tad so I’m not burying my own voice in their style. That said, I am very aware that I’ve taken quite a bit from both Philip Pullman and Neil Gaiman, but hopefully not to the point where I seem derivative. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and all that. Walt Simonson, and the way that he told mythological stories during his run on The Mighty Thor, is also a pretty clear antecedent for my writing.

MW: How about artists?

GO’C: Oh, so many influences to list here, but some of the biggest that spring to mind are Bill Watterson, Mike Mignola, P. Craig Russell, and the aforementioned Walt Simonson.

MW: Can you tell us a little about your process? In the author’s note, you mention writing three different drafts of Poseidon before you found the right approach, so I’m guessing that means you work from script first. Do you thumbnail as you go or wait until the script is complete? How does the process unfold from there?

GO’C: No, unfortunately I don’t just work from a script — for me, at least, since comics are such a synthesis of words and pictures, I tend to create both at the same time, building up the images and text simultaneously. So, the bummer about that is that when I tossed the first two drafts of Poseidon it wasn’t just scripts — it was two full dummies with drawings and everything (well, a full dummy and change — I only got through about two thirds of the second draft before I jettisoned it).

MW: Ouch.

GO’C: I start by reading every myth I can that relates to the subject until my head is literally swimming with cool stuff, and then I draw a ton of pictures and snippets of text in my sketchbooks. I assemble these elements into thumbnail sketches (the hardest part!) that tell a coherent story, and then I make a dummy of it, which is what I’ll show to my editors, with a separately typed script. After that, I go to finishes.

MW: In Poseidon you use a palette of really rich, saturated blues and greens, which of course is perfect for the god of the sea. I’d love to hear about how you approach coloring for all your books, how you arrive at the right palette, and so forth.

GO’C: Coloring was something I was very insecure about for years — I don’t feel like I have a very subtle color sense. I’m not very good with grays and browns (they look very similar to me) so I tend to have a very saturated palette with a lot of very bold colors. I feel like I’ve gotten a hang for it and most people seem to really like what I do with color which has been very rewarding for me. I tend to have an idea before I begin a book of what the dominant color scheme will be, and I envision the final colors as I draw the black and white artwork. Poseidon was always going to be about the deep blue greens, Hades was all about the deep cool purples, Aphrodite is all teal and pink. I’ve hardly used red in the series up until this point because the upcoming Ares is going to be all about the red and I wanted to really hold it back for that book.

MW: Do you still draw on paper with pen and pencil or have you gone digital?

GO’C: I still draw on paper, with a g-nib pen and brushes for Olympians. I get a certain amount of drag with the pen and brushes drawing on paper that I don’t get on a slick Wacom tablet. I do a certain amount of drawing and retouching digitally, but about 95% of the black-and-white artwork is on the paper.

MW: Besides Greek myths, what were your favorite books and comics as a kid? And what are you enjoying reading these days?

GO’C: My reading is all over the place, when I have a chance to do it. Lately I’ve not had much time to read, and the stack of things I want to devour is growing. I’m thinking of getting an Audible account so that I can at least listen to books while I draw. As a kid, I read a lot of comics and comic strips, and a lot of nonfiction, particularly biology-type stuff, animals and dinosaurs and things. I also really like humorous books — stuff like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — that don’t take themselves too seriously but are so, so clever and funny.

MW: You mentioned that book six in your Olympians series is Aphrodite. What else can you tell us about it?

GO’C: It’s all about love and the power it has — and not just love as a romantic concept but as the all-powerful generative power of life it fuels. Aphrodite is the outsider, the stranger of the Olympian family, and it’s an exploration of her struggles to fit in and get along with a group of very powerful deities who feel threatened, in different ways, by the fact that she is the very embodiment of the power of love — in that sense, she might just be the most powerful Olympian, a fact that especially doesn’t sit well with the frequently-smitten Zeus.

A bona fide geek: here’s the proof. Image courtesy George O’Connor.

MW: At GeekMom we’re constantly talking about our geeky passions. We’d love to hear to hear about yours! What are you into besides mythology and comics?

GO’C: Oh man, I’m the king of geekery, it’s almost alarming. I have a pretty sweet collection of Masters of the Universe action figures — I grew up with them, and they make these deluxe collector versions now that I have an almost complete set of. I also have a pretty decent Lego town that I’m working on very slowly. I’m pretty geeky about standup and improv comedy too. The list could go on and on…

MW: Spoken like a true geek. George, thanks so much for chatting with us! I can’t wait for the next installment of The Olympians!